With economic development and social progress, supermarkets have become the main channel of everyday consumption of people. Retaining their existing customers in this fiercely competitive environment is the crucial problem that most supermarket enterprises are having to face now. All these enterprises have just one goal, to keep their customer churn rates as low as possible.

What is Customer Churn?

With modernization making its way to almost every sector of our life, grocery and retail businesses are quickly making a move to build up an online or digital presence. With the introduction of online grocery/household delivery apps, it’s never been easy to be able to order all the essential stuff at the touch of a button. Scroll through the app or website, select all the items that are needed, add to cart and checkout for payment. The items will be delivered directly to the customers household. Features like “2 hour delivery “for a small premium are a great deal to the end consumers. Overall, no customer would even need to step out of their houses to get daily groceries.

However, it’s not all precisely free of hassles. Although such services ensure that better quality items are delivered to end customers, there have been several complaints about receiving subpar quality items. Apart from that, customers might face issues with the online app itself. There have been cases of payments being deducted twice at the checkout page. However, these are not things that cannot be solved. Businesses do ensure to resolve such hassles as soon as possible with minimal intrusion.

Some of the factors mentioned away might contribute to customer churn. Hence a business needs to weigh in these factors and determine metrics that affect one or more of these. Once the parameters are defined that impact the customer churn for the business, it will help better understand why customers are disengaged and ready to leave. Once potential churners are identified, retailers can then take proactive ways to neutralize the churn before it happens. Let us now discuss three such ways –

Hassle Free Online Experience:

Customers need to feel the seamless experience provided online so that they may have the urge to come back again and try out the same. Businesses need to ensure that there is minimal disruption during the grocery ordering process. Be it the application layout, the menu scrolling, or the ease of payment at checkout, everything needs to be organized and well coordinated to be able to provide that seamless experience. Addressing any issues in the online platform as quickly as possible is essential for better customer experience. Various payment modes during checkout and a “ready to help “customer support will add golden feathers to this experience. Overall, the customer should feel the ease and the simplicity of using this online platform so that they may feel like trying it again. Customers’ online behavior data can provide insight into which customers are likely to churn and which might reorder using AI and ML.

Define The Valuable Customer Base:

There will always be a segment of customers who will remain loyal to the brand or business. It’s a good practice to separate this section from the rest and make sure that they get all that they have signed up for in the perfect way possible. These are the customers that any business would want to keep the most. Valuable customers are responsible for bringing in the most revenue and hence need to be taken care of, vigilantly. A record of all the interactions with any customer will reveal how involved they are at each stage. It will also let know if there were any issues with a product or service that the customer had to face and if there has been a resolution to the matter. Segmenting customers into groups, namely profitability, likelihood to positively respond to the offer of staying with the service and the readiness to leave will help predict customer churn more efficiently. Simple customer transaction data, their browsing data can provide insight into categorizing valuable customers from others.

Offer Competitive Incentives:

Customers who are likely to defect will often come back to you if you offer them incentives like personalized offers and discounts on retail products. However, the point to note here is that the business should be capable of deciding if the offer is profitable or not, which is where AI plays a critical role. The cost of the retention program bought by the application of incentives should not outweigh the profits from the customers retained. Here is where dynamic customer segmentation plays a vital role. It’s not efficient for any business to be wasting tons of money on customers who are not likely to bring any substantial revenue. Personalized pricing incentives can be designed using past sales data and customer behavior data so that customers get irresistible offers that prevent them from dropping off or help them to come back and order more.

Rather than losing customers, utilizing information-driven promoting methodologies to upgrade client experience will help reduce churn rates for any business. If you are looking for a platform to help you out, try Datoin.